Thursday, August 23, 2012

mysteries

"As I see it, we know we are truly grown up when we stop trying to fix people. At its deepest level life is not a problem but a mystery. The distinction... is fundamental; problems are solved, mysteries are not... At one time or another each of us confronts an experience so powerful, bewildering, joyous or terrifying that all our efforts to see it as a problem are futile...Each of us reaches the end of reason's rope. And when we do, we can either grip harder and get nowhere, or we can let go and fall. For what does mystery ask of us? Only that we be in its presence, that we fully, consciously hand ourselves over. That is all, and that is everything."

-- Philip Simmons, from an address at Harvard Medical School, March 2001